SVR

The Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is Russia's external intelligence agency, founded in December 1991 as one of the successors of the Soviet Union's KGB. Unlike the FSB, it was tasked with intelligence and espionage activities outside Russia, and it worked alongside the GRU military intelligence, which deployed six times as many spies in foreign countries in 1997. During the 1990s, thousands of SVR agents and intelligence officers lived under deep cover abroad, and they were said to have trained Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's spies, cooperated with the secret police forces of post-Soviet countries such as Azerbaijan and Belarus, assassinated Russia's rivals such as Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev and Alexander Litvinenko, and launched internet disinformation campaigns (adding propaganda and disinformation to educational websites, sending emails to US broadcasters, whitewashing Russian foreign policy, creating a good image of Russia, promoting anti-American feelings, and creating dissension and unrest inside the USA). The SVR actively recruited Russian citizens who lived in foreign countries, allegedly forcing them into service on pain of death.